trained lawyers--mere servants of the royal household, the barons
called them; and by means of justices in eyre he brought it into touch
with all localities in the kingdom, and convinced his people that there
was a king who meant to govern with their help.

These experts had a free hand as regards the law they administered. The
old Anglo-Saxon customs which had done duty for law had degenerated
into antiquated formalities, varying in almost every shire and hundred,
which were perforce ignored by Henry's judges because they were
incomprehensible. So much as they understood and approved they blended
with principles drawn from the revived study of Roman law and with
Frankish and Norman customs. The legal rules thus elaborated by the
king's court were applied by the justices in eyre where-ever their
circuits took them, and became in time the common law of England,
common because it admitted no local bars and no provincial prejudices.
One great stride had been taken in the making of the English nation,
when the king's court, trespassing upon local popular and feudal
jurisdiction, dumped upon the Anglo-Saxon market the following among
other foreign legal concepts--assize, circuit, suit, plaintiff,
defendant, maintenance, livery, possession, property, probate,
recovery, trespass, treason, felony, fine, coroner, court, inquest,
judge, jury, justice, verdict, taxation, charter, liberty,
representation, parliament, and constitution. It is difficult to over-
estimate the debt the English people owe to their powers of absorbing
imports. The very watchwords of progress and catchwords of liberty,
from the trial by jury which was ascribed to Alfred the Great to the
charter extorted from John, were alien immigrants. We call them alien
because they were alien to the Anglo-Saxons; but they are the warp and
woof of English institutions, which are too great and too complex to
have sprung from purely insular sources.